The Simple Mobile Tools suite was sold to an adware vendor last year. Plenty of links to stories if you're interested, even here on HN.

Yes, the SMT apps are slowly being forked over to the Fossify project: https://www.fossify.org/.

I can't even get angry at that, because it seems like just another popular business pattern:

* build a nice product

* become popular and gain trust with customers

* sell the company to a scammer

* profit!

I’d do that in a heartbeat. I have a family to take care of. My customers can follow me to my next project.

> I’d do that in a heartbeat.

> My customers can follow me to my next project.

If you are willing to sell your customers to an ad firm, why should they trust your next project?

Because I have a family to feed, and I’m on their side offering them valid replacement for the app they’ve now lost to ad giants.

If you sold the app to the ad company, the terms of the sale are almost certainly going to prohibit you from building a competitor. You'd have to start a new venture in a different area.

Weird that their GitHub says "without ads", but the apps in the play store say contains ads. It looks like they're doing ads/paid model in the app store, are they ad-free from F-Droid?

It was sold to an adware vendor that is milking the brand hard. Another one for the 'used to be great' pile

They were forked to the "Fossify" tools from the version just before the adware takeover. All the "Fossify" versions are available on F-Droid:

https://search.f-droid.org/?q=fossify&lang=en